Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Fighting jet lag with science

[The method] involves resetting your body clock with small doses of the hormone melatonin for three days before flight time — combined with going to bed an hour earlier each day — and then taking in bright light, natural or artificial, after arriving [at your destination].

However, an "alertness consultant" (yes, that's an actual job title) has a low-tech solution: napping.

“When I was at NASA, we did a study involving 26-minute naps and we found they boosted performance by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent. Naps of less than a half-hour work."